A misconception

It seems there's a misconception worth clearing up. That of a misatribution on a scale so large that the name of the object being misatributed was as well misatributed to the wrong person. While this isn't as egregious as many others in history, where some things have been given the names of people who have nothing to do with the object (see: biology and taxonomy), in writing this website, this one has become near and dear to my heart. That is of course, the naming of the Vigenere cipher.

It's worth noting that Blaise de Vigenere was a real person who made real contributions to the cryptographical landscape in the early days, even having invented the autokey cipher, the vigenere cipher we know today has very little to do with that autokey cipher, and much more to do with what we call a ceaser cipher. By keying your ceaser cipher by letter, you can come up with an incredibly strong ciphered text, only breakable through finding the key phrase. This text can look chaotic and nonsensical, and while I didn't dare, some versions of a vigenere cipher even include capital letters and numbers to further confuse.

Of course, these will always be stronger in conjunction with other ways of hiding text, especially if an order is chosen which preserves capitalization in letters during the cryptographic process (this could be done by simply encrypting a text in a case-specific language, then running it through a vigenere cipher after that). I've seen that done on previous projects, and it definitely peaks my interest.

Back to the point of this page: the misatribution. What makes this so bad is that, while Vigenere did invent the autokey cipher, the modern day vigenere cipher is not even based off of that autokey cipher! Instead, it's based off of one of Vigenere's contemporaries, Giovan Battista Bellaso. Bellaso is actually considered to be the inventor of the vigenere cipher, but that is lose, as cryptographers have added to his designs over the years as the need for secrecy and the power of decrypters have grown. However, the bones of the vigenere cipher were written by Bellaso all the way in the 1500s.